Scholarship in Community
Thematic Option’s annual conferences grant our students the opportunity to enrich their academic experience by publicly presenting their original ideas and research. In response to a general call for papers, Thematic Option students develop topics under the given theme to be presented as part of a panel. Topics are reflective of students’ various disciplines and interests and focus on issues ranging from politics to popular culture. Each panel is composed of four to five students, with a USC faculty member or Thematic Option writing instructor serving as the panel’s chair and respondent. A question and answer session follows the presentation of papers in each panel, allowing panelists to defend their positions, draw new connections, and participate in collaborative dialogue with their peers.
Click on a conference title or poster for program details and students’ abstracts.
28th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 23 & 24, 2025
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Watching and being watched; the panopticon; the observer effect; nakedness; dreams and nightmares; the mind and mindfulness; self-reflection; mirroring; mortality; fascination and obsession; existence and essence; nothingness, emptiness, and nonbeing; depth, limitlessness, and the unfathomable; strangers; monsters; demons, personal or otherwise; corruption; awakening; evolution and revolution; transformation and transcendence; obscurity, weirdness, and the uncanny; interdependence and mutual shaping; righteousness and the greater good; ends and means; infinite regress; folly; despair; provocation; war and crisis; bravery; voyaging and exploration; and more.
27th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 16 & 17, 2024
I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world’s soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espíritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.
—Gloria Anzaldúa
Imagination, creativity, fantasy, and make believe; childhood and the child-like; sports, games, and toys; rules and boundaries; interaction, cooperation, and team work; competition; warfare; winning and losing; storytelling; satire and parody; drama, acting, and performance; costumes; rituals; the natural and the constructed; exaggeration and camp; distraction; deception; manipulation and exploitation; puppets and puppeteers; flexibility; nimble thinking; resistance; foolishness and mischief; free will; leisure and spontaneity; indulgence and frivolity; (ir)responsibility; gambling; risk and reward; desires, conscious and unconscious; dreams; good sense and nonsense; whimsy; fun; and more.
26th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 19 & 20, 2023
Now, come, change your theme, and sing of the making of the Wooden Horse, that Epeius fashioned with Athene’s help, that noble Odysseus contrived to have dragged inside the citadel, filled by cunning with warriors who then sacked Troy. Tell the tale as it happened, and I will say to all mankind that the god has given you freely of the power of divine song.
—The Odyssey
Subterfuge; subversion; concealment; a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a cat’s paw; sugarcoating the pill; smuggling; viruses and infection; malware; infiltration; the con and the trickster; the long game; gullibility and the mark; delusion; misunderstandings; miscommunication; illusion; disguises and costumes; passing; camouflage; stealth; war; us versus them; laying siege; lying in wait; sneak attacks; violence; death; revenge; heroism; underdogs; intelligence, ingenuity, and genius; hubris; winning at all costs; futility; overreaction; anything for love; construction; creativity; art; loyalty; teamwork; pride; legacy, myth, and legend; prophecy; storytelling; truth and lies; stalemate; inside/outside or within/without; surprise; plot twists; gotcha moments; layers; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; beware Greeks bearing gifts; and more.
25th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 20 & 21, 2022
We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.
— Albert Einstein
Dualities/binaries; inseparability; life and death; the mortal and immortal; reincarnation; the supernatural; anima and animals; vulnerability; sincerity and wholeheartedness; faith, religion, and spirituality; salvation; identity; mental health; neuroscience; identity; dis/ability; the organic and the synthetic; cyborgs; artificial intelligence; the ghost in the machine; altruism; existence; existentialism; embodied experiences; out-of-body experiences; near death experiences; drug use and abuse; illusion and reality; virtual realities; survival; essence; the essential; race and ethnicity; sex and gender; sexuality; love, lust, and sex; pleasure and pain; synesthesia; psychosomatic response; health and medicine; torture; enslavement; creation; the unknown and unknowable; inside versus outside; the body politic; body politics; and more.
24th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 20 & 21, 2021
When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.
— Anaïs Nin
Rooted in place; the roots of injustice; rooting out; root root root for the home team; as well as topics such as family; home; epigenetics; sources and origins; foundations; causality; growth and regrowth; connections, intimacy, and loneliness; intertwinings; separations; twists; things unseen; support systems; immigration; travel; settling down/in; immobility; terroir; life and death; nodes; speaking out and activism; essences; control; beginnings; inheritance; thirst and hunger; and more.
23rd Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 22 & 23, 2020
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.
— Alfred Nobel
Consequences, intended or unintended; estrangement and falling out; aftermath and backlash; response; residue, debris, and traces; mutation and transformation; protection and safeguards; opportunism; war and defense; detente; mutually assured destruction; hope; falling in and out of love; familial conflict; weapons and weaponizing; scandal; retribution and revenge; reconciliation; karma; collateral damage; the butterfly effect; prophecy; disruption; cause and effect; half-lives; natural and unnatural; apocalypse; survivors and survival; discovery vs. application; physical and mental health; side effects that vary; and more.
22nd Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 17 & 18, 2019
In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic, or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.
— Margaret Atwood
Stark contrasts and absolutes; complexities and complications; nuance; ambiguity; right and wrong; justice and righteousness; reciprocity; relativism; self and social responsibility; unreliable narrators; truth versus fiction; subjectivity; morals and ethics; equivocation; boundaries and liminal spaces; binaries and spectra; identity fluidity; ambiversion; compromise; uncertainty; heroes and monsters; vigilantism; realpolitik; power and its discontents; high, low, and popular culture; postmodernism; and more.
21st Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 18 & 19, 2018
Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Critiques and defenses of normativity; the figure of the outcast or pariah; the family; societal expectations surrounding gender, sexuality, and race; disability; good and evil; normative concepts that have organized thought over time, such as justice, truth, freedom, nature, and progress; the strange, the familiar, and the uncanny; standards and standardization; law, order, and chaos; the center and the periphery; aesthetic conventions; the category of the human; “normcore” fashion; the rhetoric of the “normie,” the “basic,” and the “random”; sanity and insanity; the pure and the grotesque; the ideal, the average, the ordinary, and the insignificant; desire, the forbidden, and the taboo; and more.
20th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 17 & 18, 2017
I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
— Mae West
Temptation; desire; ambition; progress; hubris; silence; warnings and danger; the forbidden; dreams and nightmares; monsters; fear; love; confrontation; listening and hearing; communication; technology and technophobia; social media; journalism; accidents; tragedy; triumph; the hero’s journey; sanity and insanity; and more.
19th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 12 & 13, 2016
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Revolution; progress; protest; power to the people; crisis; stagnation; -isms and -ologies; fixed/fluid identities; aid; self-help; intervention; evolution; war and peace; conflict and resolution; political, social, cultural, and artistic movements; rise and fall; procrastination or go time; law and justice; revenge; courage; technology; love and lust; truth and revelation; lies, white or otherwise; the press and media; sustainability and alternatives; the final countdown; and more.
18th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 14 & 15, 2015
The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.
— Stephen Hawking
Past, present, and future; origin stories; evolution; genetics; psychoanalysis; progress; myth and mythmaking; fate and destiny; nostalgia; cultural construction, destruction, and reconstruction; reformation and restoration; hegemony; the canon; the new; revolution; the American Dream; family; childhood and coming-of-age; identity; memory; hindsight; tradition; plans and schemes; and more.
17th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 15 & 16, 2014
Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there’s no exit in any direction
‘Cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes
— Bob Dylan, “Series of Dreams”
Illusion; hallucination; imagination; obsession; ambition; love and lust; chaos and confusion; mystery; conspiracy; cultural construction; anthropomorphism; transformation; altered states; body and soul; the mind; politics; faith; technology; social media; the unknown; absurdity; insanity; and more.
16th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 8 & 9, 2013
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other — not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.
— Nelson Mandela
Allegiances; connections, positive and negative; friends and family; romantic attachment; religion; ethnicity; geographical location; politics; career; technology and social media; to make secure; to confine or restrict; to put under obligation; to bandage; to group; the role of tragedies in bringing communities together while seemingly tearing them apart; and more.
15th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 10 & 11, 2012
Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.
— Oscar Wilde, “Icarus”
Hubris; ambition; invention, creativity, and art; the rise and the fall; liberty; imprisonment; fatality; beauty; wonder; lust; temptation; flights (of fancy); parents and children; youth and age; heaven and earth; myth; the natural and the unnatural; liminal states; leaders and followers; rebellion; loss; success and failure; courage; and more.
14th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 12 & 13, 2011
When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138
Truth; fiction; narrative; religion and belief; science and hypothesis; white lies; news media; politics, politicians, and political campaigns; war; family; love and romance; betrayal and treason; propaganda; advertising; acting and performance; interrogation; confession; witness; perjury; myth; the American Dream; hyperreality; childhood and adulthood; education; common sense; crime; con artists; and more.
13th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 13 & 14, 2010
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
— Jack Kerouac
Departure and arrival; obstacles; the quest; travel; immigration and emigration; runaways; permanence; escape; self-discovery; life and death; home; marginalization; liminal spaces; borders and borderlands; progress; technology; past and future; the chase; tripping; signposts and milestones; transcendence; the path to success; innerspace; transients and transience; gates; tolls; freewill and fate; and more.
12th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 7 & 8, 2009
Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu.
— Chaung Tzu
Imagination; the self and the other; magic; interpretation and meaning; truth and lies; fantasies and nightmares; ghosts; faith and religion; communities, collectives, and cults; marginalization; liminal spaces; utopia; artificial intelligence; normal and abnormal; the flesh and the spirit; the American Dream; drugs and altered states; art and the artist; love; escape; alternate dimensions and the multiverse; social networking; gaming; virtual reality; hope; heroes; monsters; permanence; innocence; memory; advertising; through the looking glass or down the rabbit hole; all that can be dreamt of in your philosophy; and more.
11th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 8 & 9, 2008
First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric.
— Ryszard Kapuściński
The self and the other; the raw and the cooked; cannibalism; biology; peace and conflict; instinct vs. intellect; the savage within; interpretation and meaning; allegiances and community; liminal spaces; normal and abnormal; the flesh and the spirit; mechanization; raging against the machine; art, madness, and isolation; taming the beast; sexual identity; the Apollonian and the Dionysian; permanence; personal and collective devastation; memory; fanaticism and terrorism; civilization and its discontents; and more.
10th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 10 & 11, 2007
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
— John Updike
Biology and brain; peace and conflict; storytelling; psychology; interpretation and meaning; allegiances and community; the body; the flesh and the spirit; consumption; mechanization; raging against the machine; art; madness; isolation; sexual identity; passion; permanence; personal and collective devastation; memory; fanaticism and terrorism; claiming the “here and now” for the “ever after”; and more.
9th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 10 & 11, 2006
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Merging/converging cultures; the original and the reproduction; mutation; interpretation and meaning; the brain; language acquisition; theories of representation; technology; globalization; peace and conflict; nonverbal communication; miscommunication; immigration; visual culture; cloning; music theory; emotion; art; intention; Babel; universality; semiotics; linguistics; subversion; mass communication and the media; espionage; adaptation; the internet; gender; film theory; psychology; memory and dreams; and more.
8th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 13 & 14, 2005
Curiosity is the thirst of the soul.
— Samuel Johnson
Knowledge; disease; desire; imagination; the unconscious; manipulation; the human condition; sex; blame; the Human Genome Project; the Internet; engendering; hope; cultural myths; original sin; femmes fatales; the hidden; the invisible; translation; new world order; globalization; free will; evil; gender; moral ambiguity; international politics; limitation; conundrum; alienation; information; security; Postlapsarian disappointment; paradox; the gaze; the forbidden; chaos; nation building; thinking inside and outside the box; and more.
7th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 7 & 8, 2004
Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations.
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Lists; obsessions; databases; histories; epistemologies; the canon; the masses; zombies; docile bodies; leaders and the led; subjectivity; society; cultural value; esprit de corps; fetishization; competition; pageants; picket lines; achievement; nationalism and globalization; conformity and nonconformity; membership and alienation; regulation and resistance; activism; and more.
6th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 9 & 10, 2003
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
— Genesis 11: 1-9
Yearning; curiosity; fascination; myth and metaphor; permanence; community; understanding; peace; hegemony; difference; nostalgia; homeland; exiles and displaced others; fortresses and strongholds; ordering and overreaching; desire and regulation, transgression and power; wish-fulfillment; fantasy; gothic nightmares; globalization; and more.
5th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 12 & 13, 2002
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
— Marshall McLuhan
Limits; edges; blurred lines; in-betweenness; liminality; hybridity; transgression; erosion; border crossing; permeability; transcendence; multiplicity of self; interdependence; entanglement; simultaneity; cultural fusion; shifting perspectives; meaning and meaninglessness; cognitive dissonance; and more.
4th Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 13 & 14, 2001
She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings.
— Jeannette Winterson, Written on the Body
Domination, power, and control; rejection, resistance, and revolution; disruption, agitation, and subversion; utopias and dystopias; unpredictability; self-reliance; change; co-option; pacification; fashion; radicalism; and more.
3rd Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
March 31 & April 1, 2000
Like to a cement fix
Be a standing cinema
Dress my friends up just for show
See them as they really are
Put a peephole in my brain
Two New Pence to have a go
I’d like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show
— David Bowie, “Andy Warhol”
Taste and tastemakers; opinion; fashion; the serious and the frivolous; the few and the many; entertainment and edification; inclusion and exclusion; gatekeeping; relegation; elevation; heritage; and more.
2nd Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 9 & 10, 1999
Oops, out of time.
— Prince, “1999”
Anxiety and hope; endings and beginnings; paradise and apocalypse; exponential change; prophecy; promise; the unknown; Y2K; virtual capital; telecommunication; cyberpunk; cyborgs and prosthesis; genetic mapping and cloning; germ-warfare; the real and the virtual; the self and the other; public and private; boundaries; frontiers; self-definition; consumerism; myth; the supernatural; skepticism; cynicism; celebrity; and more.
1st Annual Thematic Option Research Conference
April 17 & 18, 1998
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
— Jean Baudrillard
Instability; deconstruction; disillusionment; broken promises; subjective realities; hyperreality; difference and diversity; pluralism; self-reflexivity; the myth of progress; shades of gray; unreliable narrators; ambiguity and paradox; metafiction; pastiche, play, and irony; simulacra; bricolage; technoculture; identity politics; media saturation; and more.
